Scuttlebiz: New Panera Bread bakery-cafe headed to Grovetown

Damon Cline @damoncline1

Saturday

Nov 10, 2018 at 3:00 PMNov 10, 2018 at 3:00 PM

A fast-casual café is on its way to a fast-growing section of Columbia County.

Panera Bread plans to open its fourth metro-area restaurant on an outparcel at the Lewiston Road Kroger shopping center near Grovetown. The bakery-café is taking construction bids for a 4,900-square-foot restaurant at the corner of Lewiston and Bluegrass Trail. That's the southwest corner of Bluegrass and Lewiston – directly across the street from the Dairy Queen at the northwest corner – to be precise.

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Renderings for the 1.25-acre development show Panera will occupy 57 parking spaces next to an undeveloped 1-acre parcel that also fronts Lewiston Road. Given that nearly 20,000 cars drive (and sometimes crawl) by the property every day, I'd be shocked if the other tract isn't under development by the time Panera bakes its first bread bowl.

Panera's other eateries are at the Augusta Exchange shopping center in Augusta, the Mullins Crossing shopping center in Evans and on Whiskey Road in Aiken.

SCH-WING!: A stone's throw from the future Panera will be the area's second Wild Wing Café. The owners of the Augusta Wild Wing on Washington Road, Tricie and Jan Scholer, have purchased more than three acres on Bluegrass just north of the Kroger shopping center and are working through all the regulatory requirements.

If built, the wing-and-beer chain would occupy the 1.7-acre tract next door to Dairy Queen.

MEANWHILE, IN THE CITY: The smoked-meat specialists from North Augusta's Riverside Smoke Bar-B-Que are venturing downtown. The food truck duo of Scott Gibbs and John Johnson are busy turning the former Sandwich City cafe at 302 10th St. into their first fixed location. Riverside Smoke hopes to be up and running by mid-January or early February.

"We've been doing a lot of the work ourselves," Gibbs said.

When the two are finished, the 75-seat eatery will have two service lines: a fast-casual area for the lunch-hour/on-the-go crowd; and a more traditional seating area where diners can peruse the menu and enjoy a drink from the full-service bar. A section of space will be set aside for a small stage designed for acoustic performances.

A brick-and-mortar restaurant is something the pair has long worked toward.

"We started off in barbecue competitions and we grew from there to vending at barbecue competitions and grew from there to doing some off-the-street stuff in North Augusta," Gibbs said. "So this has kind of been a work in progress for the last few years."

Sandwich City, which opened in 1972 at the corner of 10th and Ellis streets, closed in February.

"We want it to be as close to small-batch, competition-style barbecue as possible – as fresh as we can get it," he said. "That's what we know and that's what we do."

WENDY GETS A NEW OUTFIT: The Wendy's restaurant at 3013 Peach Orchard Road is scheduled for renovation. It's been there since 1977. Not much else to say about it.

MEGA MILLIONS: I was scrolling through recent property records and came across a $48.4 million whopper: Augusta Resource Center on Aging Inc. to LCB Brandon Wilde LLC.

That's the sale of University Health Care System's 73-acre Brandon Wilde retirement community at the corner of Washington and Owens roads to Life Care Services, an Iowa-based senior-living management firm.

University, which developed the continuing-care facility in 1990, announced in June it was negotiating the sale because it was becoming increasingly difficult to operate a stand-alone community at the level of quality its 400 residents "expect and deserve."

Des Moines-based LCS has no such issues; it operates more than 140 retirement properties across the U.S., including five others in Georgia.

University-affiliated corporate entities still own 40 undeveloped acres west of Brandon Wilde as well as 62 acres to the north, which serves as University's Evans Campus.

HEY, WHAT ABOUT US?: WalletHub's recently released 2019's Best College & University Rankings report compares nearly 1,000 higher-education institutions in the U.S.

But not Augusta University or University of South Carolina Aiken.

Neither metro area university made any of the personal finance site's lists. Georgia Military College also was nowhere to be found. Paine College, however, did place No. 106 on WalletHub's college list.

Before you get outraged about smaller institutions getting recognition over ours, let me quote WalletHub's asterisk: "Note: Some institutions were excluded from our sample due to data limitations. If you would like to have your university included in the 2019 Ranking please contact us at: media@wallethub.com"

A RECORD PACE: List or no list, USC Aiken is growing.

The campus just hit 3,700 students, an enrollment record that includes all students – full-time, part-time, undergraduate, graduate and online.

The university offers more than 50 majors and four graduate degrees, with the most highly sought-after programs being business administration, nursing and industrial processes engineering.

This year, USC Aiken launched a master's in educational leadership degree and bachelor's degrees in applied mathematics and applied computer science with concentrations in cybersecurity and applied gaming.

HEY BRO, HOW MUCH YOU MAKE?: We all know millennials like to talk. And text. And tweet. And Tumblr. But did you know they're more likely to talk about their salary information than others?

That's what a Bankrate.com survey said. The personal finance website said a third of those aged 18 to 37 would divulge their salary to co-workers, compared to just 18 percent of baby boomers.

About half of millennials, 48 percent, would tell their romantic partner; 58 percent would tell a friend; and 64 percent would tell a non-spouse family member.

Bankrate says about 24 percent of adults, regardless of age, have divulged their pay to a co-worker, with men more likely to do so than women (29 percent vs. 20 percent).

Interestingly, nearly 1 in 5 adults – 19 percent – haven't told their spouse or romantic co-habitator how much they earn. Seems like a topic that would come up at some point.

LIVING THE DREAM: I don't need to find a new line of work. My "dream job," apparently, is the one I already have.

At least, that's according to a survey by MidAmerica Nazarene University.

The University's "America's Dream Job" survey asked workers in 25 industries what their dream industry would be, and 11 of them (including HR professionals, insurance workers and retail employees) chose the "entertainment industry."

The rest, including accountants, engineers, educators, construction workers and broadcasters/journalists, said they were perfectly happy with the industry they are in.

You know people sometimes lie on surveys, right?

Here's where the dream job-survey gets interesting: A "dream salary" for men is $444,958 for men and $278,637 for women – a difference of about $166,321. Make of that what you will.

Gender aside, survey respondents clearly want to work on Easy Street. Their dream jobs have 52 days of paid time off each year (compared to America's 15-day average), 38-hour workweeks (like the Dutch!) and the ability to work "remotely" (i.e. at home, in jammies) 11 days a month.

Basically, everyone wants Hugh Hefner's old job.

But not so fast! When it comes to actually building a business (like Hef did), a majority of respondents said they wouldn't do it if the business required them to log more than 60 hours per week. Jeez...with so many rainbows and unicorns in people's heads, it's a wonder 25 percent of Americans say their current job is their "dream job."

Seriously, I love my job. But I'm not going to tell you my salary. What do I look like, a millennial?

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN: It's open-enrollment season, including for those who don't get employer-sponsored health insurance.

Open enrollment for Georgia’s 2019 exchange, which operates under the Affordable Care Act, started Nov. 1 and runs through Dec. 15.

If you happen to be one of those roughly 500,000 folks navigating Georgia's exchange, you'll see you mostly have a choice between "Insurance Company A" and "Insurance Company A." That's right: Only one option exists in 145 of Georgia's 159 counties.

And in the metro Augusta area, that "choice" is the Blue Cross Blue Shield Healthcare Plan of Georgia.

According to consumer site ValuePenguin.com, the price of the cheapest local exchange plan – BCBSHP Silver Pathway X HMO 6000 – will run $1,249 a month for a couple over 40 with a child in Burke, Columbia and McDuffie counties. In Richmond County, the plan costs $1,207.

Insurance isn't my area of expertise, so I can offer no explanation on why an unmarried 40-year-old in Richmond County can pay $464 a month for BCBSHP's plan while an unmarried 40-year-old in tiny Cook County (south Georgia) must pay $740. Or why the same coverage can be had in Burke, Columbia and McDuffie counties for $481.

This wasn't my idea, folks.

The only advice I can give to the uninsured who don't want state-exchange insurance is simple: don't buy it. Now that the tax penalty has been stripped from Obamacare, there's nothing compelling you to follow the toothless (and horribly flawed) mandate. I personally wouldn't make that gamble because medical care is not free (and if it was, you probably wouldn't like it). But to each his own.

Besides, if you are truly poor, you're probably already on Medicaid. If you're just a cheapskate, you might consider looking into an ACA-compliant "off-exchange" plan through your friendly independent insurance agent. He or she can sit down with you and help you shop around for a plan that best suits your needs.

I'm not saying you'll be happy with the price quote, but at least you'll have the satisfaction of freely exercising your options.

Take that, "The Man."

Reach Damon Cline at (706) 823-3352 or dcline@augustachronicle.com.

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